The background description provided herein is for the purpose of generally presenting the context of the disclosure. Work of the presently named inventors, to the extent it is described in this background section, as well as aspects of the description that may not otherwise qualify as prior art at the time of filing, are neither expressly nor impliedly admitted as prior art against the present disclosure.
In a data center with large amount of storage space, a backplane may be used to mount a number of storage drives in an enclosure. To management the operation of the backplane system, a backplane (BP) controller or an enclosure management (EM) controller may be provided. Generally, in a BP controller or an EM controller, a lot of pins are needed to efficiently manage the drives. With the advent of Non-Volatile Memory Express (NVMe) solid-state drives (SSDs) in the enterprise server market, the modern backplane system generally has a combination of Serial Attached SCSI (SAS)/Serial AT Attachment (SATA) hard disk drives (HDDs) and NVMe SSDs. Thus, it has become necessary to find an efficient way to manage these drives through an EM or BP controller using the limited numbers of pins on the controller.
Therefore, an unaddressed need exists in the art to address the aforementioned deficiencies and inadequacies.